Month: July 2018

This has been a particularly difficult day. For starters I am blogging in the shadow of my broken laptop. This is a problem in general but specifically because the projects I’ve been working on–including a novel–sit open on the desktop of the broken computer. This means the files will be corrupted and I cannot say for certain how much, if any, data can be recovered by my tech guys. I’m sad for a number of reasons and this is foremost among them.

The rest is minor league. I did have a moment today where I could not properly hold a joystick or remember the controls for a game. I was summarily slaughtered by my children one after the other. I am okay with losing but less okay with feeling crippled and discombobulated. I am starting to suspect that there is something actually wrong with me. I don’t know what to point to save for these minor things that medical people are likely to misdiagnose or overlook. I know only that I feel off.

Some Thoughts:

1. I added the second header on free will because it seemed relevant, but as I am typing I have no idea why it was relevant.
2. I also recognize that my memory is wildly off kilter.
3. I’m listening to that same Scalzi piece and he’s talking about writer’s block in a way that seems more like a meditation for himself than anything.
4. 10×4: New idea to spend ten minutes out of an hour four hours a day working on a critical writing project. A solid ten of words produces volume. Of course, I just need to stop being a lazy piece of shit and recognize that the writing matters or it doesnt.

I’m listening to Redshirts by John Scalzi. I like the man–as a human. I had the opportunity to chat briefly with him following a presentation he did with Cory Doctorow. Both men are engaging experts in the field in which they write. It reminded me of being at the ASU conference recently and recognizing the difference between a touring writer and a guy who writes in the time between teaching, coaching, and watching a crap ton of TV. You’ll note that I didn’t even mention games. I’ve been playing more in the last few days but far far less overall. You’ll also note that I am not including phone-based games, which consume at least an hour of my allotted 24.

I am a pretty good reader/listener/watcher. I consume fiction daily and make it probably the largest part of my day. I’ve written in the past about the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ philosophy, which holds true but you gotta eat something, right? I consume a ton of fiction and I believe it to be part of being a good writer. The other half–butt in chair–remains a huge short coming. Finally I’ve been able to align that mentally with the exercise as part of a regimen that is necessary towards continued healthy living.

I think it has something to do with yesterday’s blog.

I still believe the other part of why I often feel so paralyzed is a mixture of the inability to really get started on anything, the lack of sustainable drive to continue, and the failure to create a self-regulating schedule to enable any of it.

Big words too. Big words haunt me.

But back to the schedule issue: I need one. I need to be able to visualize a goal and see the path from end back to beginning, recognizing the small victories along the way. I need to incentivize–really incentivize and not just give myself the incentives for free–the small steps in order to encourage completion of the goal. In essence, I need to grow the hell up. I’m past 40 and I feel like a kid a lot of the times. Not physically, of course. I am old and broken down, but mentally I feel infantile at times as though I don’t need to be responsible for myself at all.

But I do.

No internet in the house, so here is yesterday’s entry into the blogosphere:

As I type stories are being written about a team of Thai soccer kids being rescued from a cave deep below the earth. In the room near me my family watches Sherlock Holmes. On my email a Quora debate rages as to the strongest Marvel characters. I sit here reflecting on my life and my limits, wondering why I never became the superhero my youth suggested.

I used to have this quote that went something like, “If I dropped out of society for twenty years, trained every day, I could become the ultimate badass.” I didn’t do any of that. In truth I allowed myself to continue to believe that a lack of specialization and, ultimately, dedication allowed me to still have the option to do anything. Reality suggests that I was very very wrong about this. In truth, I stopped learning and stopped improving. Instead my skillset hardened and atrophied around a very limited range of inputs and abilities. I didn’t get great at anything. My ability to get good at anything new rusted in place.

 

I’m knocking off much of that rust as we speak. See, the secret isn’t to drop everything to learn one thing or give up on specialization in order to wait for that perfect storm of knowing. Instead the key is to actually learn. The key is to do as Holmes does and observe and absorb it all. Learn everything around you and you will be learned.

 

Forty plus years to figure out the stuff I knew best as a baby.

 

There are a handful of conventions that are common tread for stories. One such convention is Checkov’s gun–the premise that any item introduced must offer value later in the film. There is another, the MacGuffin, that argues that an item itself is not important but the desire to have it is. Both of these conventions create the expectations for Ant Man and the Wasp. In fact the movie relies on these two things in order to make the plot make any kind of sense. Even more interesting is the fact that it doesn’t even matter. The plot is as thin as waxpaper and that hardly impacts the film. I wasn’t even there for plot. I wanted to see Paul Rudd be, well, Paul Rudd. I wasn’t disappointed.

Ant Man and the Wasp unsurprisingly focuses on the rescue of the missing Mrs. Pym. She went into the quantum dimension and we know that people can actually come back from that because Lang (Rudd) did it. Thus sets the stage for part 2. What I found interesting about the film is that it was affected by the actions of the MCU. Lang is on house arrest because of his actions in Civil War. As the movie takes place between Civil War and Infinity War (Lots of wars out there in the world of supers) it remains largely unaffected by the events of Infinity War. It also makes no real effort to explain the world at large and how every day people deal with supers. It left me longing for a return of the Agents of Shield show in the way it could’ve been done–with all of the movies being linked to it.

As for the story itself, meh. I just loved watching Rudd be funny and having fun on screen as a hero. Ant Man, like Spiderman, is comic relief and the movie allows itself to be that while telling a fast paced story that is less about the pseudo science and the world at large than it is about chase scenes and poignant father-daughter moments.

Some Thoughts:

1. Life is good. 5 days of good.

If left to their own devices, boys will behave very badly. They don’t seem to know when to stop–as though the testosterone pulsing through their veins says ‘let’s go! never stop!’ some small measure of common sense might help mitigate the ‘going’ but boys don’t seem to have any of that on tap. Instead they have parents. I’m a parent. I’m a single parent–especially when my partner is not around–and they think I’m just another boy without the restrictor plates.

I don’t watch a lot of NASCAR. Basically none. Still, I was engaged by the idea of restrictor plates. These plates are affixed to a car to limit the intake of air and thus speed of the vehicle. It is meant to make things more competitive. In kids a restrictor plate is basically any set of boundaries that exist in a given space. My boys spent the entire day trying to push mine. They thought that because I wanted to hang out with them for a while it meant they could do as they pleased and expect me to cater to that.

Nope.

Just nope.

It was a hard but necessary day to see how they are with new eyes.

I am staying true to my plan three days in. Of course, three days is barely a factor of the 90 it takes to successfully form a habit–for me at least. I am trying hard to find a real sense of balance in my day and my life and also trying to relax, budget, etc. At some point writing needs to become a focal part of that daily structure, but it has not. It ought to very soon.

Writing and grading.

It is extremely hard to sit down and devote real energy to either. Yet both require and deserve so much energy that I have to ask myself why I am not spending more hours on the job. Probably because it is hard and the rewards seem so distant. I’d rather the quick stim of a video game than the slow and patient plodding of an assignment sheet. Even the reward of a completed story–that effervescent high–feels like it takes too long of a journey as compared to the short dirty pique of a video game win.

Part of my journey is really identifying the problems I face in these last years (this second half) of my life. Instant gratification is foremost amongst them.

Some Thoughts:

1. Just spent the last 4 hours trying to assemble a mount for a TV. It left me feeling very tired and very very stupid. I still believe in the old adage about preparation. I also believe that next time I am going to make sure I know everything about a project before I take one step.

I gave my boys a ten minute warning. In reality it was meant to give me time to write out this post before we launch into what promises to be a very busy day. It is the 4th, Independence Day, and the day I am helping my partner get settled into her new home.

This too is part of the path–us being separated in a sense and growing together in a sense as we rediscover basic wants and needs. I personally am learning day by day what matters most in my universe. These are all lessons that should have been learned long ago. These are the kinds of things that people argue, “If I had it all to do over again…” Indeed I wish I’d known these things earlier and made different choices, but I am not long on regret. I am long on learning from what is. Right now what is is an opportunity still dangling out there like a brick of gold on a ledge. I need to go out of my comfort zone to get what I want in life, but I know the risk promises the satisfaction of having written that novel, of having made the family I want, of living the kind of life I aspired to live.

For a while the question has been, ‘do I really want those things?’ The question should have been. ‘am I going to put in the effort for those things?’ That feels like a more fundamental human question. They are linked, but not as people often suggest. It isn’t so much that you don’t want what you don’t fight for. It is a matter of comfort and the cobwebs that stretch across your body and the belly that rises like hot dough, and mental joints that creak from disuse. What Maslow never told us was that once you ascend the pyramid, it is very hard to look back down even a step. To displace oneself from comfort and routine is far more difficult and overlooked than I would have ever suspected.

Here we are now in this year of my rebuilding and I am learning how high I’ve sat, guarded by my fragile white picket fence in this house of cards that so easily tumbles. Here I am learning how rare and strange it is to want it to fall down.

The road begins with new experiences, routines, and challenges. I’ve made vows to read (actual print) every day. I’m working towards the re-exploration of my bookcases and beyond just reorganizing, I intend to revisit many of the novels and short story collections as well as spend a good chunk of time reading the couple dozen books I never did read. Meanwhile I have adopted this theory of exploration. I believe that we live to learn and explore. We are all dying in the physical sense but it is the spirit and the mind that enable us to endure. I intend to endure and to do so by learning and trying new things at every opportunity, and by breaking from the old routines to discover new ones.

Today I went to the Mighty Mighty Bosstones concert. It is the first time I’ve seen them and my first Ska since the Dropkick Murphy’s wandered through Ames, IA back in the college days. The concert was loud and driven and dressed in meaning and metaphor. The band was smaller than usual but their sound filled the space. It was my first ska with my partner and my first time taking any of my kids to a show. I intended to blog out a review, but that isn’t really want I want to do with this time and space. I want to reflect on having had the opportunity and having seized that opportunity when I might not have done so a year ago.

This road is about growth and change, and I am already making good on the promises of yesterday while healing the wounds of yesteryear. No big proclamations here. It is just another day on the long road and preparing for every tomorrow.

Some Thoughts:

1. It is not lost on me how the days add up. It stands to reason that on Day 1 of the return to the regularly scheduled numbering system (in a year). I will be in a new home with my partner and we will have completed the absolute merger of lives.

It has been a year since the blog broke; since I broke. I didn’t spend that year healing. I spent it treading water and trying to find some small peace to hold on to. I found that. I reconnected with love. I learned about how hard that can be and how fragile humans can be in general. I learned about my limitations emotionally and the things that weigh me down both literally and otherwise. In short I didn’t spend the last year living but instead trying to figure out a way to live and making sense of what little there was to hold on to while hoping for more.

It was not the best year.

It was not the worst year. There were moments of pure anguish and darkness that pushed me past my limits. I need both hands to count the number of whole days I wanted to be my last. It brought back the shades of that 12-14 gap of time where I truly believe much of my life was decided and much much more of my passion and promise were squandered. I remember being thirteen and opening my bedroom window eight floors up and thinking how easy it would be to step through head first. I wouldn’t have met my partner then. I wouldn’t have had these amazing kids or these memories–both good and bad–or the understanding that in each life there is darkness and light and we exist in both as we exist in day and night. We cannot have all of one and none of the other at either end of the spectrum. We may believe it to be such. I spent a number of weeks out of the last 52 believing it to be such, but it is not the case. It is melodramatic and short-sighted to only see the awful or the good and believe that this is what life is.

I’ve matured. I learned about the issues I face both as an individual and as a part of this growing family. I learned that I need friends to talk to outside of my relationship, because a singular perspective doesn’t grant much perspective. I learned that I am happiest cuddled up. I learned that video games aren’t my only escape. I flee into story and screens just as often. I learned that the thing I am running from is exactly what I am running towards–self realization of what I am capable of for better or worse.

I’ve learned that I have a lot more learning and healing to do over this next year and unless I commit to the endeavor fully, I will fail a great deal more than myself.

I like to be poetic. I started with the idea of ‘before the dawn’ but that felt more appropriate for day 365. This works well for 364. Today is about looking forward and deciding what forward is going to look like. Tomorrow is about looking backwards and understanding how I got to the place I am at.

I decided that Tuesday will mark version 3.0 of this blog. This is not a permanent change. I will mark the next 365 days of the blog with a clear purpose in mind. Each day over the next year is dedicated to personal growth and healing. I am making mental time for myself. Each day is about how I change and how I get to a place where I am healthy and feel good about myself. Each day is a mile marker on that incredibly long journey back to a place where I can be productive and happy. The blog will reflect that journey. 10 minutes will remind me and share with the world how I did for the day and how that day carries me forward into the next.

For a long time now I did not expect to be alive by Christmas. I know it sounds melodramatic, but the truth of the matter is I’ve felt as unhealthy as I am unhappy, and while I’ve talked aloud about fixing that, the problem only worsens on all levels–physical, mental, and even social. It reached the point where I totally alienated my partner and made a reality of that feeling of solitude every writer talks about but never actually wants.

But that is a conversation for tomorrow.

Today is about goals and moving forward. I plan to make time and space for my health, my happiness, my words, and my heart–in reverse order. It all starts with the heart and the happiness that comes from lasting human connections. We are a social species, so I must repair the bonds that nurture me. Next, my words are suffering from a serious lack of seat time. For starters I need a new seat and a new schedule to place my butt in said seat. I must be diligent and make the time required to find my way back to the well of words.

Last is happiness. Lasting happiness is a function of the above. I find happiness in peace and order as well, so I must create an environment (or at least restore one) where I feel some lasting peace. I’m considering the creation of a ‘wild hour’ where we focus on pure crazy, because in balance we must have all things.

That’s it for now. That is what I’ve come up with.